It's all about community

All my best wishes for this new year, about love, health, and love (quoting Patrick Sebastien, “love is everything”).

Ok, let’s talk about something more serious…
Today, I want to talk about Rust. Yes, Rust, again. But this time it’s not about something I discovered, implemented or anything along the lines…
You know, during the two last years, I tried to “promote” this programming language everywhere, because I strongly believe in Rust. I made two different talks at two meetups in Lille, attended to several Rust events and conferences, and each time I was thinking about how awesome the Rust community is. And now it’s time to make a blog post for this.
So, I want to talk from the heart about the Rust community, and how it is awesome to see people building an awesome project together.

Do note that, sometimes, I use the word “we” to design the Rust community, and this blog article reflects only my feelings as a Rust fan since 2015.

People are all equal

The first thing I noticed initially when starting with Rust is how the community is mature.
I think that the maturity came because: 1) the community is pretty small, 2) every member shares the idea that people are all equal.
The strongest rule of the community is that every member of the community must respects the other ones, and don’t be toxic to each other. This is, I think, the core of the current community, and it encourages people to never be afraid posting something, or to ask for help in a problem that they think is dumb (remember that no question is stupid - no one).

People are everything

Some developers are unhappy that the Mozilla Foundation is sponsoring Rust, because they think that its future will only focus on what Mozilla products need, and not on what Rust developers need.
It is true that this kind of incidents happen (actually, it had happened in the past and continues to happen even now), but, here, it’s totally different.
Some of the Rust maintainers are hired by Mozilla but, every day, those persons are listening to your needs and your ideas (via public RFCs), asking what you wanna do with Rust, how to help you with your daily issues, or how can they improve the language for your projects.
This is making the difference, because benefits happen in both directions: you, as a developer, feel integrated into the community, and the language can evolve and become even richer for everyone.

A perfect place to learn

The Rust community strongly encourages the “newbies” to learn Rust, and we (members of the community) are here to help them in order to build and deploy in the most simplest possible way their project(s), simply because we believe in people.
At this moment, 1,985 people have already contributed to the Rust compiler on github, for 50 releases and 73,379 commits, which is a huge success for an Open Source project.
Just to compare with another Open Source programming language, 985 persons have contributed to the Go compiler, for 202 releases and 35,115 commits.

Freedom and excitement of exchanges

Each week, I see on Twitter, Slack and IRC Rust developers posting blog articles, the crate(s) they are developing, or the couple of issues they are/were working on (and some hints to solve them).
Do note that you don’t need to be a Rust wizard to propose an idea, and you should not be afraid to share something!
Being afraid to post something on the Internet is actually the most common barrier to freedom - so, please, feel free to share whatever you want!
Also, some Rust projects have become important now, because of the community’s support.

So, to conclude: feel free to join us, to discuss and to share your thoughts or ideas!
We want to hear you to improve this fantastic project, because we strongly believe you can! :-)

Thanks to Alexandre and Sankalp for the English review, and a special thanks to Xavier for pushing me (every week) in writing blog posts.

Published
by
15 Jan, 2018
and tagged community and rust
using 688 words.